I'm begging you to write more essays

I’m begging you to write more essays. Or to start writing essays if you aren’t already. No, not like the essays you were assigned in school. I’m talking about one of the greatest tools to learn faster, think deeper, improve the articulation of your ideas and beliefs, and avoid being replaced by AI. But those are the selfish personal benefits of writing. There’s something deeper. The modern information environment is breaking our ability to think, and most people don’t even notice. Essays might be one of the last forms of content that actually develops your capacity to make sense of reality. We are living through the largest-scale production of fake thinking in human history. The consequences are quite high, and only a select few people care. In this letter, I want to show you exactly how this fake thinking epidemic (if it goes on as it is) will not only make your own life worse, but potentially lead to the collapse of society. Then, I want to help you write your first essay so you can fix one of the most precious resources you have - your mind. (Turning it into a career or side income doesn’t hurt either). The written word as the primary type of media was probably required for democracy to work, because it required the capacity to pay attention to an idea for long enough to understand it. — Daniel Schmachtenberger Social media and AI are quite literally a threat to civilization. I know that sounds insane. How could scrolling on Instagram actually lead to the collapse of society? Watching a little TikTok dance can’t hurt, right? Reading someone’s 5 second opinion about Trump on X is just a part of your lunch break, yeah? Yes, but only when you are so focused on yourself. When you zoom out and see what’s really at play, it’s hard to unsee. There are 3 layers to this. Stick with me here, because this goes deep. The first layer is that the epistemic commons is becoming poisoned. What is the epistemic commons? Think of it as our water source, but for information, and that’s extremely important. Most people watch the news to stay “informed,” or to educate themselves, but if you look closely, they’re just becoming complacent. Their lives aren’t changing for the better. In fact, most people are becoming more jaded, more polarized, and more violent. Whenever you post on social media, whenever someone creates a TV show or movie, or whenever someone produces music on Spotify, the epistemic commons (or public information environment) grows. This obviously gets complex and requires a level of systems thinking to fully determine, but if the content you publish in public hurts more than it helps, and it is not counterbalanced by content that does help, our intellectual water source becomes contaminated. Why is that bad? Because the information you or any individual consumes influences their identity. Their identity influences their life trajectory and behavior. The form of content you consume trains your attention span, tolerance for complexity, ability to hold contradictions, and the capacity for nuance. That’s why you learn, right? To equip yourself with the knowledge and cognitive ability to achieve the life you want? But that’s just it... Before you can solve any problem that is a civilizational threat in climate, governance, AI alignment, public health, or the rest, you need a population capable of understanding the problem coherently. 99% of people don’t even know what these problems entail, because they’re happy drooling over the cat video on their phone. The takeaway here that we will touch on later is this - Does what you consume or create lead to a beneficial behavior change in yourself and others? Or are you unconsciously soaking in information that silently makes your life worse, and poisoning the information environment by what you contribute to it? That’s layer one. Reminder: Build a 2-Hour Content System in 14 Days starts April 7th (a few days from now). If you are interested in turning thoughtful writing into a modern career, or simply want to realize that you do have ideas worth putting out in public, consider joining before the start date. As technology is empowering our choices and we are getting something like the power of gods, you have to have something like the love and the wisdom of gods to wield that or you self-destruct. I want to introduce you to one of the most important thinkers of our time. His name is Daniel Schmachtenberger. He doesn’t post much, but he occasionally makes an appearance on podcasts. When you listen to them, you can instantly tell that he is a calm, nuanced, and non-polarizing systems thinker. He has dedicated his life to what he calls the Metacrisis, and while it’s much deeper than what type of content is posted on the internet, that’s what we’re going to focus on. In a nutshell, Schmachtenberger believes that there are 3 massive threats that can result in 3 outcomes, two of those outcomes being catastrophic. The 3 threats (he calls them generator functions) are: Rivalrous dynamics – Win-lose games where one party’s gain requires another’s loss. Think arms races, corporate competition, social media content, and academic publishing (hoarding data to publish first). Substrate consumption – “Substrate” is what something needs to exist, like soil for plants, attention for media, trust for markets. When systems consume their foundation faster than they can regenerate, that’s bad. Think depleting top soil that took millennia to form and the attention economy consuming human cognitive capacity faster than it recovers. Exponential technology – Tools and systems that improve themselves at accelerating rates, outpacing human wisdom. Think AI doubling in capacity, automated weapons, and social media algorithms evolving faster than we can study their psychological impacts. When those 3 things converge, they can result in either civilizational collapse (nuclear war, unaligned AI, ecological destruction, engineered pandemics) or dystopian control (total surveillance, digital authoritarianism, elimination of individual agency). He calls these “attractors,” or the basins that complex societies tend to fall into. The “third attractor,” or the good outcome here, is a world where sense-making, shared understanding, and aligned incentives exist. When we look at the internet, AI, and social media, it’s pretty easy to see how this is playing out. When creators compete for attention, they optimize for engagement rather than transformation (rivalrous dynamics). The algorithm only measures how much you’ve clicked, watched, or liked, so creators are much more likely to abandon truth and impact for whatever will make people react. That’s an obvious problem. When engagement is optimized, the content that individuals consume does not require thinking or understanding, so that muscle atrophies. The “substrate” being consumed is cognitive capacity, which is downstream of attention. AI accelerates content production, yes, but it also accelerates imitation, and when there’s only destructive content to imitate, you can see where that goes. AI itself isn’t the issue. The issue is that it can mimic what looks like real thinking without requiring any cognitive effort from either the creator or consumer. So, the default outcome here is the epistemic commons (or mental water supply) becomes poisoned incredibly fast because it’s optimized for content that looks like it should shift your thinking but structurally it cannot. That leads to layer three - what you can do about it, and how you can profit from it in a meaningful way. Wisdom is not algorithmic and cannot be made algorithmic. For the past few decades, a certain type of content has dominated the internet. Specifically, content that delivers conclusions without requiring thought. It’s fast food for the mind. So we’re going to call this category of media “fast content” - because social media companies use the same psychological triggers to get you addicted as fast food companies who realized fat, sug…